The term health-care waste includes all the waste generated within health-care facilities, especially in the course of their medical activities, precaution activities or other medical procedures. The waste is infectious directly or indirectly, toxic and hazardous. Normally, health-care waste is categorized as infectious waste, pathological waste, injury waste, pharmaceutical waste and chemical waste. Total generation of health-care waste in China is 1,880 to 2,800 ton per day, wherein 1,380 to 2060 ton of waste is produced in cities above county level.
Centralized Treatment facility for health-care waste has been established in Chinese cities as Shijiazhuang, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Fuzhou, Nanjing, Suzhou, Nanning and Xining, other cities such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Changsha are under construction. After the burst of SARS, the Chinese government invested enormously on hazardous waste disposal, particularly on treating medical waste. More work is planned in two years to build centralized disposal facilities in county-level regions with large populations.
Diverse forms of treatment technologies are available for health-care waste, including sanitary landfilling, high-pressure steam treatment, chemical treatment, microwave treatment and incineration. The generic kinds of incineration technology used are pyrolysis incinerators, rotary kilns, dual-chamber starved-air incinerators and plasma pyrolysis and the like.